NEW DETAILS

BUCKETS

Home Depot buckets like the ones used by Ian Charles Borbely to store the dismembered body of his partner after murdering her in 2007. (Submitted photo)

FINISHED WORK

Writer Zander Sherman looks pensively out the window of his Bracebridge home a week before his article revealing the details of the Borbely murder trial is published in Toronto Life. The article took two months of intensive searching through court documents and conductng interviews. (Photo by Jennifer Bowman)

HIDING PLACE

The cottage on Wood Lake where the remains of Samantha Collins were found in buckets inside a wooden crate. (Submitted photo)

POLICE SKETCH

A police drawing of the inside of the crate where Samantha Collins body was found packed into buckets. (Submitted photo)

BRACEBRIDGE — Previously unreported evidence shows drugs and an explosive relationship set the stage for the murder and dismemberment of Samantha Collins.

Evidence guarded by a publication ban and sometimes kept from the jury because the judge deemed it “prejudicial and inflammatory,” according to Bracebridge writer Zander Sherman, is revealed after Sherman spent two months searching for the details of the rest of the gruesome story.

The story of Collins' murder in Bracebridge by her partner Ian Charles Borbely is laced with drugs and violence. Borbely is now seeking an appeal after being sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 17 years for second degree murder and a five-year concurrent sentence for indignity to human remains.

Sherman’s article in the August edition of Toronto Life, which hits newsstands on July 17, describes why the couple moved to Muskoka, their personal history and lifestyle and what happened to dismember the relationship long before the body.

I think Muskokans followed the discovery of the body, they followed the trial, and we were interested in that but I think we were also frustrated by the lack of information — Zander Sherman, writer

“The context in which they met, Collins was heavily involved in a drug subculture, an exotic dancer in Mississauga. She introduced Borbely to cocaine and the relationship spiralled out of control form there,” he said in an interview.

The couple often fought violently, according to Sherman’s research. Police identified Collins' body by her fingerprints and tattoos, which they had on file from a previous arrest when she punched Borbely after he threatened to report her to the Children’s Aid. One landlord was so upset with their fighting he paid them $900 to vacate their apartment.

The article is the culmination of dozens of interviews, hundreds of pages of court transcripts and contents from six boxes of court documents, one of them Sherman said was supposed to be sealed but wasn’t. It reveals how Collins’ body was dismembered and Collins’ plan to leave Borbely the day he murdered her.

Sherman began his search after he and a friend wrote a song named after the location of the murder, Gryffin Lodge Road. The song is a melancholy folk song that leaves a haunting silence following the last chord, a chord that also continued to reverberate inside Sherman.

“A part of me wasn’t finished telling the story yet,” he said.

“I think Muskokans followed the discovery of the body, they followed the trial, and we were interested in that but I think we were also frustrated by the lack of information,” he said.

As he began looking for the missing puzzle pieces, little details began to haunt him. A few weeks into his search for answers he read the forensic anthropologist’s report that determined Samantha Collins was dismembered by a reciprocating saw, a common tool used by Muskoka carpenters. The next day he visited a friend’s house and noticed they were using a reciprocating saw to rough cut lumber for their new deck.

“Just seeing that saw on that deck and just having read about it being used to dismember a body hit the story home to me in a new way,” he said.

The Home Depot buckets Borbely placed Collins’ body into after he dismembered her also grabbed Sherman’s attention.

“On March 23, 2007 Ian Borbely walked into the Bracebridge Home Depot and bought four five-gallon Home Depot buckets and four matching lids. That set off alarm bells because contractors who buy these buckets use them for mixing and therefore the lids are extraneous,” he said.

The bucket to lid sales ratio for the Bracebridge store is 8.5 to 1, he said. In six months on either side of that date no one at that store bought four buckets with four matching lids.

Besides the gruesome and ugly details of the murder and dismemberment that captivated audiences and imagination, Sherman was also struck by the local response to the story.

“Muskoka is known as a wealthy destination and I think we treat wealth as a synonym for security. So we think crimes like this can’t happen here,” he said. “We like to think of it as immune to violent crime.”

After this story, his first crime story, Sherman has several ideas for his next story, some are local and some are not. He’s moving on, even though the story is not complete and likely never will be.

“There are empty puzzle-piece shaped holes in this story that will never be filled in simply because we don’t have all of the information,” Sherman said, “but we don’t need those few missing pieces to be able to see the totality of what happened.”